Arthur Chang

Everyone seems to be jumping ship and leaving Flickr to go over to Google+ for sharing photos.  I won't deny that Flickr may be dying, but it's not dead yet.

There's been a lot of talk about the death or inevitable death of Flickr for the photography community, more notably the blog post by Thomas Hawk and Google+ post by Ingo Meckmann.  But there is one big reason why Flickr won't die immediately and why there are plenty of photographers who can't just yet give up on the legendary photo sharing community: not all of us are popular hot shot photographers.

Aside from the innovation Flickr is lacking in terms of presenting photos, a lot of the other features are still incredibly important and still absent from the newer sharing platforms.  Thomas Hawk says he interacts with the community way more on Google+ now, in fact he doesn't have any interaction on Flickr anymore.  This works because hundreds, if not thousands by now, have added him into their Google+ photography circles.  This doesn't work for the majority of Flickr users out there who don't have his level of popularity.

New and upcoming photographers, or those who aren't the type to really market their personal brand, don't get the same influx of photo fiends giving them good constructive criticism on their photography on Google+.  It's also impossible for them to grow a photography centric network on Google+ alone.  Instead they just get the same old Facebook effect where all their friends exclaim how awesome the camera is, and asking them for help with their choice between a Nikon Coolpix vs. Canon Powershot.

Flickr is (currently) the only service putting lesser known, and perhaps equally as skilled, photographers into a constructive arena that nobody else has duplicated yet.  Flickr allows photographers new to the world of online photo communities a way to grow and expand.  It's also a good playing ground for those who are fine with just moderate interaction with a few photography friends.

New services now are sharing with your more general network of friends.  Instagram is sharing with your usual network that may be partly built off of your Twitter followers, Google+ from your email contacts, Facebook is really everyone you've ever talked to in person.  What Flickr did and does different is, put you in a community of a photography-centered community.  Yes, there is overlap with your general friend networks, but there are plenty more that would never make it to your Facebook friend list.

More popular photographers will be able to grow their network utilizing their personal brand to grow their new Google+ network until they hit a nice critical mass, where they do no extra work to keep getting more people to add them into photography circles.  Everyone else, which I believe represents a much larger number of photographers, will not have the same ability.  In fact, it would be so hard to get to the level of what Flickr already offers, that it's just not worth the effort.

That is why Flickr is still alive for many.  That is why I can't see the path to Google+ as clearly as some.

That being said, I want to see Google+ pull something off that will totally negate the need for the Flickr community for all photographers.  So far the only contender that has something to offer right now is much more modern Flickr clone, 500px.com.  What do you have up your sleeve Google+ team?

I don't see cloning Flickr communities straight off being the right thing to do with Google+.  Google+ Circles can't allow for people to add themselves, request invites to, etc.  All you can do is comment and beg people to add you, to deem you worthy.  It is currently impossible to be discovered through Google+ alone.  Recruiting is a huge undertaking.

Hopefully I can make it to the next photoshoot that is organized where G+ members show up so I can express the frustration of leaving the lesser-known photographers behind.  Or maybe they can be convinced to go on some photoshoots with the SFBAS group.

Thomas Hawk: any thoughts on how Google+ might improve discovery of photographers not on the A-list?

By the way, if you guys have it in your heart, add me to your Google+ Photographers Circle so I can start getting some of the same benefits as Thomas Hawk on my photos, and I will return the favor as well!  Here's my profile: http://gplus.to/arthurchang

The Flickr API is an incredibly well done API, allowing for very easy queries that provide a ton of information about photos, people, places, and more.  Sometimes, however, results from different api calls overlap, and it's hard to decide which to use.

The most common overlap is the flickr.photos.search with many other photo fetching calls.  The reason is because you can pass in countless amounts of parameters to narrow down your search, which can be replaced by other more simple searches.

I encountered an overlap when I was returning a page full of thumbnails from a particular Flickr user.  I was using the people.getPublicPhotos, passing in the nsid for the user.  This returned the latest photos the user posted, which was great.  I left it as is until I needed to get a few extras, including sorting.  The flickr.getPublicPhotos is very generic, and doesn't accept any other parameters, which is very limiting, so I turned to the flickr.photos.search to do a search with the nsid passed in, and I got the same results but with more control!

I'm wondering if this would yield a slower query, but in my tests there were no differences on my end.  Everything probably funnels eventually to the photos.search query on their end, with some nice wrappers that simplify some of the simpler use cases.

Anyhow, I grouped all my photo lookups into one function, and made it super DRY by giving a type for the search.  Here's an example (using the Flickraw ruby flickr api wrapper):

begin
        extras = 'owner_name, views, date_taken, geo'
       
        if params[:category] == 'user'
          user = flickr.people.findByUsername(:username => params[:search_term])
          search_term = user.nsid
          type = 'user_id'
          params[:sort] = 'date-posted-desc' if params[:sort].nil?
        else
          search_term = params[:search_term]
          type = 'text'
          params[:sort] = 'relevance' if params[:sort].nil?
        end
       
        @photos = flickr.photos.search(:sort => params[:sort], type.to_sym => search_term, :extras => extras)
      rescue Exception => e
        flash[:error] = 'No results'
        logger.info "#{e.message}"
      end

The above is simplified, but I funnel keyword searches with username searches by doing a lookup on the category of the search parameters.  The search is by username, so I have to do an extra call to get the user data which includes the nsid, and set that to the search term.

Try out the Flickr API, and if writing in ruby, the Flickraw gem kicks ass.  When the flickraw library loads, it fetches methods from flickr using introspective capabilities.  Thus the flickraw library does not need to update everytime flickr updates their api.  Flickraw has been my favorite solution so far in terms of flickr wrappers.